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This month Peking University was pleased to welcome world-famous astrophysicist, Alex Filippenko, to visit the campus. During the visit, Alex Filippenko delivered a public lecture at the Sunny Hall of the Ying Jie Conference Center on May 8, 2015.

Alex Filippenko is Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. As an enthusiastic instructor, Filippenko has been highly welcomed by students after he took a faculty position at UC Berkeley. He won numerous awards for his contributions to teaching and to the popularization of science. He was voted the “Best Professor” at UC Berkeley a record nine times by students, and in 2006 he was named “U.S. Professor of the Year” by the Carnegie Foundation. In 2004 he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. In 2009, Filippenko was elected member of the American National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors accorded to American scientists.

Filippenko’s areas of research include supernovae, active galaxies, black holes and the expansion of the Universe. He is the only individual to belong to both of the teams that discovered that the expansion of the Universe is actually accelerating with time – a discovery that won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011 and obtained the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is currently spearheading the survey for nearby supernovae with the 0.76-meter Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope at Lick Observatory.

In his public lecture entitled “Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe” at Peking University, Filippenko showed his current research and discussed the implications of the conclusion that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, driven by dark energy, a mysterious force that makes up 70% of the energy density of the Universe and is stretching space faster and faster with time. After the talk, Filippenko answered many questions from the audience about astronomy, including the nature of dark energy and dark matter, the origin of the Universe and life, and the destiny of the Universe.

Filippenko’s lecture is the thirteenth lecture of the Centennial Physics Lecture series at Peking University. More than two hundred teachers and students from Peking University and other local colleges joined in the lecture. Prof. Li Yansong, Vice-President of Peking University, issued Alex Filippenko a commemorative medal for the Centennial Physics Lecture. Prof. Xie Xincheng, Dean of the School of Physics, opened the lecture ceremony. Director of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, Prof. Luis C. Ho, one of Filippenko’s former Ph.D students, introduced the speaker and chaired the talk.